One more war in Somalia

So the US won a war in Somalia, for once. Congrats. Last time they were there they had soldiers ‘etsa7alo’ - I’m afraid I don’t know the English name for that - though I think the English may have invented it? - but it is simply tying someone’s legs to a horse and then making the horse run so the person is dragged on his face all across town. Modern variants have replaced the horse with a truck - so you had a truck dragging two American soldiers across Mogadishu. Word has it that the trail of blood was remarkably short.

What? You’re saying the US did not fight? There were no Marines there? Ah. My bad. I meant to say:
The US won a proxy war in Somalia. Sending the Ethiopian troops, whose ego was crushed when Eritrea basically spat on their faces and declared independence a little more than a decade ago, thereby snatching all the coastline from Ethiopia and leaving their former occupiers as a locked in country.
So Ethiopians are frustrated. It doesn’t help that they periodically declare war on Egypt over sharing the resources of the Nile; when Egypt finally agreed to renegotiate, the outcome was a grandiose ‘Nile Basin Initiative’ with multi-billion dollars projects that currently sit in the drawer of the Secretariat of the NBI in Kenya, waiting for, well, the Nile to turn into Petroleum or something. So now they’re even more frustrated.
Plus, they could use a way out to the sea. Whether they end up occupying (oops. We don’t say occupation anymore. It’s called ‘military presence’.) or having a grateful faction at the head of the government, they badly needed to access a port, since Eritrea still holds a grudge against them. Somalia looked pretty cool, no? With a long coastline on both the Red Sea and the Ocean, a fallen stateless state is an easy target.

So they got some US weapons and went into Somalia to fight one of the warring factions. Technically, they VOLUNTEERED to support the Interim government in place. This looks pretty.
But the Somalian reality is that, basically since 1992 (when US soldiers were dragged across the street Mogadishu on their noses) there has been no real authority in Somalia. Besides Somaliland, a quasi-autonomous region that has decided it was better on its own, Mogadishu has been a place where the old adage of ‘the King is the one who wakes up first each morning’ applies pretty well.
The interim government was a relatively interesting attempt to stabilise the country. Interesting, and quite failed.
Then came the Islamic Courts. I have no idea what they are (were?) all about, but they were merely yet another warring faction who wanted a piece of the country.
Those folks, however, seemed to have some support; and after a few months they had Mogadishu and the South under control. Things were looking somewhat promising.

But, it says ‘Islamic’, right? The US, in its infinite wisdom, wasn’t willing to take it. They didn’t really read the Courts’ programme - perhaps because they didn’t really have one :) - but they decided that those bloody ‘Islamists’ were going down.

So there you have it. A short, and soon-to-be-forgotten chapter in the history of the US myopic foreign policy. It’s not a clash of civilisations, except in GWB’s tiny tiny head. It’s pure geopolitics. And Ethiopia may be a bitch of a country - they’re not dumb.

I’m just so fucking mad the US was too short-sighted to give Somalis a chance to stability. You know, a real country kind of thing. They almost forgot what it feels like.

Oh, and, 5000 dead Somalis in two days. Well done, you Ethiopian motherfuckers.